Sworn Brother (38 page)
‘Then what about Glaum?’ I said. ‘What part does he play in all this? To me he seems nothing more than a lazy lout, a jester.’
‘We met Glaum on our way to the island,’ Grettir said. ‘It was pure chance. Glaum is a nobody. He has no home, no land, nothing. But he’s amusing, and his company can be entertaining. He volunteered to come to the island with us and until he decides to leave I’m willing to let him stay. He tries to make himself useful, collecting firewood, helping haul up the ladders, doing some fishing, generally being about the place.’
‘You’re not concerned that Glaum might try to attack you, like Redbeard, hoping to gain the bounty money?
‘No. Glaum’s not like that. He’s too lazy, too weak. He’s not a bounty hunter.’
‘But there’s something foreboding about Glaum,’ I said. ‘I can’t define what it is, but I have a feeling that he represents misfortune. I would be happier if you sent him away.’
‘Maybe I will,’ said Grettir, ‘but not yet.’
‘Perhaps matters will improve,’ I suggested. ‘I’ve heard it said that if a man survives outlawry for a span of twenty years then the sentence is complete. In a couple of years that will be the case for you.’
‘I think not,’ Grettir answered gloomily. ‘Something is bound to go wrong before then. My luck is dire and my enemies will never give up. My reputation and the reward for my death or capture means that any young hothead will have a try at killing me or taking me prisoner.’
His forebodings came true in the early spring. This was the season when the farmers would normally bring out their sheep to Drang and leave them there for the summer grazing. Doubtless this prompted them, under Thorbjorn Ongul’s leadership, to launch a plan to retake the island. A young man from Norway, Haering by name, had arrived in the area. Like everyone else, he soon heard about Grettir living on Drang Island and of the huge reward being offered for his death. He contacted Thorbjorn Ongul and told him that he was an expert climber of cliffs. Haering boasted that there was no cliff which he could not scale single-handed and without ropes. He suggested that if he could be landed on Drang without Grettir knowing, he would surprise the outlaw and either kill or wound him so severely that the others would be able to storm the island. Thorbjorn Ongul was shrewd. He decided that the best way to approach Drang without alerting Grettir’s suspicions would be in a large, ten-oared boat with a cargo of live sheep. From his boat he would call up to Grettir, asking for permission to land the animals. Ongul calculated that Grettir would agree because he had already depleted the flock on the island. Meanwhile Haering would climb the cliffs on the opposite side of Drang and creep up on Grettir from behind.
Grettir and I worked out Ongul’s stratagem only after it had failed and it was a narrow escape. We saw the ten-oared boat approaching from a great distance down the fiord, and watched as it slowly drew closer. Soon we could see the four or five men aboard and the dozen or so sheep. Haering himself was not visible. He must have crouched down and hidden among the animals. Ongul was at the helm and steered for the landing place at the foot of the ladder leading up to the summit. But he took a slightly unusual course and, at the time, we failed to understand why. There was a short interval when the boat was so close under the cliffs and passing round the end of the island that it was lost to sight from anyone standing at the cliff top. This was the moment when Haering must have slipped overboard and swum ashore. Moments later Ongul and his boat reappeared in view, the oarsmen rested on their oars, and Ongul shouted up to Grettir, asking him to agree to let more sheep graze on the island. Grettir called back down, and the negotiations began. Grettir, usually so alert, was hoodwinked. He warned Ongul that the moment anyone tried to climb the ladders, the upper ladder would be withdrawn. Meanwhile, with a great deal of deliberate fumbling, the men in the boat began to get the sheep ready to be hoisted.
Unknown to us up on the summit, Haering had begun to climb. The young man was inching his way up the cliff face by a route which no one had attempted or even imagined possible. It was, by any standards, an extraordinary feat of agility. Unaided, the young man managed to find one handhold after another. He hauled himself upward past the ledges of nesting seabirds. Sometimes the rock face leaned out so far that Haering was obliged to cling on, hanging by his fingers as he searched for a grip, then clambered upwards like a spider. His feet, to prevent them slipping, were clad only in thick woollen socks, which he had wetted to give them a better grip.
I know about the wet socks because it was I who first saw Haering after he had hauled himself over the topmost rim of the cliff. It was the old grey ram which alerted me. Grettir, Illugi and Glaum were clustered at the top of the ladder, looking down at
Ongul and his farmer colleagues as they discussed the landing of the sheep. Their attention was completely distracted. By contrast, I had deliberately stayed back from the cliff edge so I could not be seen from below. No one apart from the farmer who had brought me to Drang knew that I was on the island, and it seemed a good idea to keep my presence a secret. So I noticed the sudden movement among the sheep grazing near the cliff edge opposite where Grettir was standing. The animals raised their heads from grazing, and stood stock still, staring out into space. They were alarmed and I saw them tense as if to flee. The old grey ram, however, trotted confidently forward as though he expected to be petted. A moment later I saw a hand rise over the cliff edge, as if from the void, and feel around until it found a grip. Then Haering’s head appeared. Slowly, very slowly, he eased himself over the rim of the cliff until he was lying face down flat on the grass. That was when I saw the wet socks and noted that, to lighten himself for the climb, his only weapon was a small axe tied with a leather thong to his back.
I gave a low whistle to warn the others. Grettir and Illugi both looked round and immediately saw the danger. As Haering got to his feet, Grettir said something to Illugi, and it was the younger man who turned and advanced on a now-exhausted Haering. His older brother stayed behind in case his great strength was needed, with Glaum’s help, to haul up the wooden ladder.
Poor Haering, I felt sorry for him. He was utterly spent by the spectacular climb, and instead of finding Grettir and Illugi alone on the island, he now found himself confronted by four men, and without any advantage of surprise. He unslung the axe. He may have been a superb mountaineer, but he was an inexpert warrior. He held the axe loosely in from of him, and when Illugi struck at him with a sword the axe was knocked spinning out of his grasp.
Haering offered no further resistance. There was something manic about Illugi’s headlong rush at the unarmed young man. Illugi may have felt that his refuge had been violated, or maybe he had never killed a man before and was desperate to finish the job. He ran at Haering wildly, swinging his sword. Unnerved, the Norwegian turned and fled, running in his socks over the turf. But there was nowhere to go. Illugi chased his prey grimly, still cutting and slashing with his sword as Haering dodged and turned. He ran towards the boulder which masked the entrance to the dugout. Perhaps he was seeking to shelter behind it, but he did not know the lie of the land. Beyond the rock the ground suddenly fell in a steep slope at the far end of which was the edge of the cliff. From there to the sea was a sheer drop of four hundred feet. Haering ran headlong down the slope towards the precipice. Perhaps he thought his speed would carry him far enough out. Perhaps he panicked. Maybe he wanted to die by his own hand and not on Illugi’s sword. Whatever his intention was, he ran straight to the edge of the cliff and without hesitating flung himself outward … and continued running, as though still on solid ground. His legs and arms flailed as he dropped from view.
I joined Illugi at the cliff edge, crouching cautiously on the ground and then crawling forward on my belly, so that my head looked out over the vast drop. Far below, the cliff climber’s body lay broken and twisted on the beach. To my right Ongul’s people had seen the tragedy and were already rowing to the spot to retrieve the corpse.
No other attempt was made to dislodge us from Drang during the next three months. Probably Haering’s death had shocked the farmers who supported Ongul and anyhow they had their summer chores to do. Grettir, Illugi, Glaum and I stayed on the island. The friendly farmer visited us only twice, bringing us news from the mainland. The main event was the death of Snorri Godi that winter, full of years and honour, and his son Thorodd — the man whom Grettir had spared - had succeeded to the chieftainship. I wondered if Thorodd had also inherited charge of my fire ruby which I had left in his father’s safe keeping and if Snorri had told him of its history.
My sworn brother reacted glumly to the news of Snorri Godi’s death. ‘So vanishes my last hope of obtaining justice,’ he said to me as we sat in our favourite spot near the cliff edge. ‘I know that Snorri refused to take up my case at the Althing when we first arrived back in Iceland and you went to see him on my behalf. But as long as Snorri was alive, I nursed a secret hope that he would change his mind. After all, I spared his son Thorodd when he tried to kill me and win his father’s approval. But now it is too late. Snorri was the only man in Iceland who had the prestige and law skill to have my sentence of skogarmadur annulled.’
After a short pause Grettir turned to face me and said earnestly, ‘Thorgils, I want you to promise me something: I want you to give me your word that you will make something exceptional of your own life. If my life is cut short at the hands of my enemies, I don’t want you to mourn me uselessly. I want you to go out and do the things that my ill luck has never allowed me to do. Imagine that my fylgja, my other spirit, has attached itself to you, my sworn brother, and is at your shoulder, always present, seeing what you see, experiencing what you experience. A man should live his life seeking out his opportunities and fulfilling them. Not like me, cornered here on this island and becoming famous for surviving in the face of adversity.’
As Grettir spoke, a memory came back. It was of the day when Grettir and I were leaving Norway, and Grettir’s half-brother, Thorstein Galleon, had said goodbye. He had promised to avenge Grettir’s death if he was killed unjustly. Now, sitting on a cliff top on Drang, Grettir had taken me one step further. He was asking me to continue his life for him, in remembrance of our sworn brotherhood. And behind the request was an unspoken understanding between us: neither Grettir nor I expected that he would live out the full twenty years of outlawry and reach the end of the sentence imposed upon him.
The conversation had a remarkable effect on me. It changed my perception of life on Drang. Previously I had been despondent about the future, fearing the outcome of Grettir’s seemingly endless difficulties. Now I saw that it was better to enjoy whatever time there was left for us together. The change of season helped my pessimism to lift. The arrival of the brief Icelandic summer wiped away the memory of a dank and melancholy winter. I watched the tiny island change from a remote, desolate outpost to a place full of life and movement. It was the birds that did it. They arrived in their thousands, perhaps from those distant lands which Grettir dreamed of. Flock after flock came in until the sky was filled with their wings and their constant mewing and screaming mingled with the sounds of the sea and the wind. They came to breed, and they settled on the ledges, crevices and tiny outcrops of the cliffs until it seemed that there was not a single hand’s breadth that was not occupied by some seabird busily building a new nest or refurbishing an old one. Even in Greenland I had not seen so many seabirds clustered together. Their droppings ran down the cliff faces like streaks of wax when a candle gutters in the draught, and there was a constant movement of fluttering and flight. Of course, we took their eggs, or rather we took a minuscule portion of them. This was when Grettir was at his best. With his huge strength he lowered Illugi on a rope over the cliff edge so that his young brother could gather the eggs from the ledges while the angry gulls beat their wings around his head, or if they stayed on their nests, shot green slime from their throats into the face of the thief. Perhaps the proudest moment of all my relationship with Grettir was when he turned to me and asked if I would go down the precipice on the rope and I agreed. As I dangled there, high above the sea, swinging in space, with only my sworn brother’s strength to prevent me falling to my death like Haering, I felt the satisfaction of utter trust in another.
So the summer weeks passed by: sudden rain showers were interspersed with spells of brilliant sunshine when we stood on the cliff tops and watched the whales feeding in the waters around the island; or we traced the evening spread of white mist over the high moors on the mainland. Occasionally I would go by myself to a little niche on the very lip of the precipice and lie on the turf, deliberately gazing across the void and imagining I was no longer in contact with the solid ground. I hoped to achieve something my seidr mentors had long ago described to me: spirit flying. Like a small bird beginning to take wing, I wanted to send my spirit out over the sea and distant mountains and away from my physical body. For brief moments I succeeded. The earth fell away beneath me, and I felt a rush of wind on my face and saw the ground far beneath. But I never travelled far or stayed out of my body for long. I had brief glimpses of dense forest, a white landscape and felt a piercing cold. Then, like the fledgling which flutters uncertainly back to the branch, my spirit would return to where I lay, and the rush of air on my cheeks often proved to be no more than the rising wind.